What’s Your Favorite App, Margaret Atwood?

MA: Wattpad. Wattpad allows people to read and write on their phone, and on tablets and computers. It is free. It is of particular interest to kids who don’t have credit cards or people in developing countries, or to young writers who may not want their peer group to read their seedy romances. On Wattpad, they can call themselves ‘Flames of Steel,’ and release it to an audience of readers. It builds out access to reading and writing.

It is not a market for writers, but it is an entry way for writers. A couple of their writers have gone on to get contracts with publishers. It’s in 25 languages and a number of those are in parts of the world that are not going to have those things that we take for granted, such as bookstores and libraries.

Welcome to our new column, What’s Your Favorite App?, a new feature where we talk to media professionals, journalists and authors about what kinds of apps they are using in hopes of helping readers discover new apps.

Atwood is using Wattpad to distribute a story called The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. Theongoing novel is a collaboration with Naomi Alderman, British author/brains behind the exercise app Zombies, Run!. “One of us will write a chapter for our character and send it to the other one, and the other would have to write their way out of it,” says Atwood. Atwood told us that she uses the Wattpad app on her laptop by has plans to check it out on her new iPad really soon.

The Canadian writer is always up to new things. These days she is also working on a serial story called Positron, which is being published exclusively as a digital read by Byliner. “It’s serial fiction written the same way that Charles Dickens used to finish his work,” Atwood told AppNewser. “He was writing it as he went along. He had not finished it before publishing each piece. It’s like an old radio serial, or a television serial where they write from week to week. If a character shows signs of life, they make that character bigger. If people don’t like the character, they get a disease.”